I Miss the Kiss of Treachery
by TheYmp
Summary: Crowley finds himself in an unendingly empty landscape. It's a brief time for reflection before deciding what should come next. Written for the 2017 Supernatural Reversebang Challenge on LiveJournal. Spoilers for season 12 finale.


**Disclaimer: I don't own** _**Supernatural**_ **or its characters - these were created by Eric Kripke - I'm just borrowing them. I'm not making any commercial gain. No harm or infringement intended.**

**_Crowley finds himself in an unendingly empty landscape. It's a brief time for reflection before deciding what should come next._**

**Written for the ****_2017 Supernatural Reversebang Challenge_**** on LiveJournal. Thanks to ****_Loracine_**** for the artwork prompt! Art and fiction title taken from ****_Disintegration_**** by ****_The Cure_****. Spoilers for season 12 finale, the outcome was Jossed long before even its original publish date.**

~#~

**I Miss the Kiss of Treachery**

**_"Remember me when I am gone away, gone far away into the silent land"  
– 'Remember', Christina Rossetti_**

Crowley was walking. _Alone_. He was so focused on the process of placing one foot in front of the other that he was barely conscious of his surroundings.

_Surroundings_. At that thought, his awareness expanded just enough to take in a little more of the outside area through which he trudged. The ground beneath his feet was desiccated mud, barren bone dry, and riven through with deep, spidering cracks. Even the air felt dry, but it wasn't hot and there was no hint of even the faintest of breezes.

He had walked for some considerable time before it dawned on him that he had no idea of either where he was or where he was heading. As if on cue, his mechanical pacing came to an abrupt end. He felt a vestigial pang of regret at the loss of the imagined sense of purpose it had given him.

He looked around, taking stock of the gray, unendingly empty landscape that surrounded him. Everything - and he used the term loosely because really there wasn't _anything_ \- seemed so very much the same in every direction. He felt dwarfed by the unending, unrelenting flatness of the terrain as it reduced him by scale to little more than an ant. It was only after several minutes of gazing into the far distance, that he came to the belated, panicked realization that he couldn't even tell from which way he'd come.

"Where the bloody hell am I?" he muttered, wincing as his voice was revealed to be nothing more than a tiny, timorous thing, lost in the vast emptiness of his surroundings.

The answer was revealed in one shocking, overwhelming flood of memory and anger and tears.

He was dead.

"_Bloody hell,_" he yelled. He cringed again, not liking how empty his words sounded as they echoed through the parched landscape, but it was enough to finally bring him to his senses.

_Those denim-clad nightmares have finally done it. They've only gone and done me in!_

_And they didn't even have the decency to do it themselves; they let me sacrifice myself for them. Bastards!_

"Well, I hope it makes them so happy they choke," he snorted. _Still, Winchesters don't really do happiness, they're more about the angst, pain and tragedy,_ he thought, cheerfully.

The tall, thin figure was there before him, without warning, within the blink of an eye. Startled from his diabolical, if petty, revenge fantasies (of a Squirrel and a Moose realizing they were trapped in a deadly situation only _he_ would have been able to get them out of with his special brand of cunning), Crowley fell back in alarm and lay sprawled at the feet of the cadaverous interloper.

Death looked down at him with bland disdain before sucking noisily at the straw protruding from the fast food drink carton he held loosely in one hand.

"You!" cried Crowley.

Death raised a querulous eyebrow. "Welcome to the Empty," sniffed Death, sounding anything but welcoming, as he waved his drink in a vaguely encompassing gesture.

Turning away from what was surely the worst party host in history _(and I've dallied in the arts and publishing scenes_), Crowley paused to take a good look around and quickly reassessed the situation. _Nah, still trapped in a spookily deserted wasteland._ "So... not Purgatory?" he asked cautiously. He'd suffered through more than a few drunken, rambling, and increasingly unlikely, re-tellings of the events in _that_ place while Dean had been going through his, all too short, black-eyed phase. It had _not_ sounded like a pleasant place at all.

"Oh no," smiled Death in a manner that made it clear he was neither remotely happy nor amused in the slightest. "You're only a monster in the _figurative_ sense." He paused to take another long slurp of his drink. "No matter how twisted your soul, you're still _technically_ human."

Crowley blinked. "I'm not sure that's a view that's quite shared by everyone." _Or me_, he added to himself, silently.

"And what, pray, would be the point of sending you to Hell?" Death sighed in his usual jaded, world-weary way. "You've already been there and made, I suppose, a reasonably adequate job of imposing some sort of order on the place. What would it teach you? No, you've done your time and now it's time for something new."

Frustrated, Crowley kicked a clump of the cracked, desiccated earth in Death's direction. He watched in impotent rage as the thick plume of dust turned in the air and floated back to coat the front of his trousers. He gave his own, slightly lesser, version of Death's put-upon sigh_. It figures that would just be my luck. There isn't even a bloody breeze here._

Death's lips gave the faintest of twitches and adopted an expression of superior amusement without his face otherwise appearing to move.

"So why am I here exactly?" asked Crowley through gritted teeth. _Really, in the old days we orchestrated tortures that were less obscure than this guy._

"Well, that's pretty much up to you. You're not going to get a neat, little parcel of all the answers tied up in a nice bundle."

"So what's with the wasteland?"

"Oh, is _that_ how you see it?" responded Death, with the first sign, albeit mild, of any real interest shown so far.

"Yes," said Crowley as he took another ineffectual kick at the surroundings, this time avoiding the worst of the resulting dust cloud.

"Some say it's the death echo of Eden."

"Really?" In the back of his mind, cogs turned and Crowley wondered at the opportunities that could be had.

"You won't find any tree of knowledge here," Death observed, recognizing the look.

Crowley snorted. "I think I know evil already."

Death's answer was immediate and without hesitation or preamble. "Yes, but do you know good?"

Crowley clenched his jaw. _When would they learn his motivations weren't about such arbitrary, asinine concepts?_

He was considering his reply - _it's not like there's much else to do around here_ \- when he was distracted by a sudden, rather significant thought.

"Hang on, I thought you were dead?"

"And I thought you were the King of Hell?" replied Death without missing a beat.

"Ah, I get it," said Crowley cheerfully, raising a hand in salute, before turning his back on Death to make a show of inspecting the distant hills. "I know from painful experience how it's not easy to accept defeat at the hands of a couple of plaid-wearing, knuckle-dragging numbskulls."

"And yet you kept helping them."

Crowley snorted, and cast a glance over his shoulder. "It's the bow legs and the mournful expressions that do it to for me every time, what can I say?" he drawled, with a wide-armed shrug and a lecherous wink. He returned to his not so nonchalant perusal of the horizon. "It's not like _you're_ any better, so _you_ tell _me_," he added spitefully.

Presumably Death had no answer, or at least there was none forthcoming.

Crowley sighed, his thoughts wandering as he stared off at the low, distant hills. He wondered where it had all gone wrong for him to have ended up here despite all his grand plans and elaborate scheming. He shook his head at the futility of it all. _If this is all there is, what was even the point of it all?_

"Be careful," counseled Death. "You're coming apart."

Crowley's gaze followed the pointed direction of Death's long, bony finger and looked over his shoulder to see that his back was starting to dissolve into small black specks that were floating up into the air. He gave a cry of alarm.

"Things have a tendency to dissipate here without the requisite force of will holding them together," observed Death.

Crowley's eyes widened. "What do I do?"

Death shrugged. "It _will_ happen in time, although you can choose to direct it. You need to decide what comes next. For some, death is the end and all they desire is to just stop, others want to go back and try again in some other form. A few decide to go on to the next stage.

"Which is?"

"That would be telling," said Death with a smirk.

"Yes?" asked Crowley, the exasperation clear in his voice.

There was a long silence.

"Oh," cried Crowley, stretching the word out over several, long, deeply sarcastic moments. "So you either know, and are choosing to not tell me, or you don't know either. Either way you're a dick."

Death seemed unperturbed by the insult. "You really _have_ spent far too long with those Winchesters," he said with a small, self-satisfied expression.

Any response was lost as the shimmering, black motes started to coalesce into a roughly humanoid shape between them.

The features started to become more detailed as the creature seemed to become more solid. Crowley sucked in a horrified breath of despair between his teeth before the _thing_ even spoke.

"Och, Fergus. What the devil are ye doing here?" cried Rowena. "Surely, his Lordship Death's got better things to be getting on with than a wasting times with you?"

"Mother," sighed Crowley, suddenly weary down to his very bones. "Go to Hell."

"You big ninny," scoffed Rowena, "I've been there, and you know what I found?" She paused, cocking her head and raising a judging eyebrow at him expectantly. "A great... big... _nothing_," she added explosively, pointing right at Crowley in case of the slim chance he hadn't caught the double entendre of her meaning.

Crowley's mouth opened and closed in impotent outrage. _They say there's nothing like a mother's love, well Rowena was never like a mother, _he thought. _Even now, after all I've done, everything I've achieved to prove myself despite her constant belittling, she's still not happy. _She'd treated him with nothing but disdain after it became more than apparent his birth wasn't going to be the big 'in' with the Pagan Council she'd hoped.

"Cat got your tongue, dear?" asked Rowena in a voice sweetened with the most bitter saccharine.

_She barely even has to say a word and it's like I'm back at home before she walked out on me._ He frowned and his eyes narrowed in suspicion. _Wait, why is she even here? Ah, of course... she's not._

"Well? Say something, you great dolt!" screamed Rowena.

Crowley smiled. "It's difficult to get as _fired up _as you," he chuckled, remembering, at last, the turbulent events before his death.

Rowena screamed in torment as she exploded into a fierce column of flame that reached as high up as the featureless gray clouds above, before burning out as quickly as it had come. Her scorched, blackened corpse, momentarily still standing, collapsed to its knees before crumbling down further into a cloud of thick black ash that was carried away as much by its own volition as by a sudden welcome breeze.

"Bravo", said Crowley mockingly, giving an insultingly slow clap, as he turned his focus back towards the still, ever-waiting Death. "_Your_ work, I assume?"

"You don't give yourself justice," said Death, who nevertheless tilted his head in a slight bow. He seemed to have acquired a large vat of popcorn from somewhere and had it wedged under the arm that still held his soft drink. He helped himself to a large handful of popcorn before continuing. "That was all you," he added _sotto voce_, when the ex-King of Hell looked less than convinced.

Crowley shuddered, feeling cold despite the absence of any discernable temperature in the environment. Even his mother's - or whatever she was - immolation had been without the heat of the apparent blaze. "It certainly felt like her, for a moment there it seemed... so real." He gave himself an exaggerated shake as if to dislodge any clinging unpleasant thoughts that might remain.

"Say, this is like that TV show," he said, struck by a more recent, but considerably less unpleasant memory. "What's it called? Yes, _Star Trek_ – it's like their _holodeck_, that always seemed to be going wrong too."

"I would have never taken you for a science fiction fan."

"I know, I know. I like to think I'm rocking a Mafioso vibe with just a hint of _The Exorcist_," Crowley explained, waving a languid hand to emphasize the sharpness of his well-tailored, if now slightly dusty, outfit. "No, it was Dean; even as a demon he did love his low-brow, popular culture. What am I talking about? Demons; they're all cut from the same cloth." He cast a significant, sneering look at Death's food. "It's also probably why you and he get on so well." Before Death could answer, Crowley interrupted with an affable gesture. "Or, at least why you never seem to quite get around to killing him."

Crowley considered the truth of his own words, before giving another unworried shrug. "Actually, with Dean, I tend to find those two outcomes to be interchangeable."

"You may well have a point," said Death dryly, taking another generous mouthful of popcorn. "About Dean," he clarified after chewing and swallowing. "But I can assure you, this is very real... and no mere illusion," he added, pointing with his chin in Crowley's general direction. "Well, maybe _somewhat_ illusionary, but no less so for its consequences."

Crowley turned to look behind him at the latest object of Death's attention; a distant regal, red-haired figure that was nevertheless making short work of stalking across the dry mud plains with a fearsome purpose.

"Oh..."he gulped.

"It seems you have a thing for strong women. Issues with a parent, maybe? Perhaps that's something else you've got in common with Mr. Winchester?" Death smirked. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I need to refill my snacks before your new adversary arrives. I wouldn't want to miss _this_ for the world."

"Urgh," spat Crowley, breaking into a diatribe regardless of his immediate audience having temporarily departed. "Abaddon's nothing but a brute. Sure, nice if you like that kind of old-style evil - and I'm not saying it doesn't sometimes have its place - but she has no... _finesse_,"

He sighed._ I worked so hard to stamp my own distinctive mark on Hell, and for what?_

"All she wants to do is kill and smash and destroy; like some great demonic toddler with no rhyme nor reason," he spat in the general direction of the approaching Knight of Hell. "And once she's kicked and beaten and tortured her way through Hell, what then?"

"What do _you_ think she would she do?" asked Death, curiously, back with another bucket of popcorn.

Crowley didn't even have to think about it. _He knew_. "Go back and do it all over again."

Death gave one his distinctive, dismissive, sniffs. "And when there's no more 'again'?" he drawled.

"Well, then I suppose there are those beneath her command. 'Poor devils', indeed."

"_You_ never seemed to treat your subjects any better," added Death, pointedly.

"Can you blame me?" Crowley replied, with a snorted huff of amusement. "Every one of them a sickening toady, only in it for themselves, scrambling over each other for any way to get ahead. _Obsequious ninnies_. Not one of them with more than two brain cells to rub together, even between them. And those that do are even _less_ trustworthy,

"I mean, what imbecile sells their immortal soul?"

Death raised a silent, amused eyebrow, but allowed Crowley to continue his rant uninterrupted.

"And those in charge were the worst! I can't even remember how long I served Lilith, a demon so _infantile_ that she even preferred possessing children. Most of the time, I think she only kept me around to reach things for her from the top shelves." He gestured to himself and his modest stature. "_Me!_ Can you imagine? 'Eerie child' has got to be the most clichéd, overused trope of all time. And that doesn't even count having to tuck her into bed each night and being forced to read, and re-read, the same damn book over and over." He shuddered, a full-body motion that made clear the depth of his degradation.

"And before her was Azazel, who was so wrapped up in his games of soldiers that he threatened the very plan to release his boss he'd been working towards. Instead, he kick-started this whole Winchester family revenge-fest into overdrive that ended up getting him and all his cronies killed."

He paused for breath, only to finally note Death's raised-eyebrows and expectant expression.

"What?" he asked defensively, realizing his mistake a bare-moment later. He turned in time for Abaddon's fist to ram home into his nose, sending a spray of blood and snot flying in all directions.

"Hello Crowley," sneered the Knight of Hell. "How come no one's bothered to rip your head off yet, you little weasel?"

Crowley stumbled back, clutching at his face. "It's not like the look suited _you_," he shot back, although the words were muffled almost to the point of incomprehensibility by his injuries.

Abaddon's expression changed to one indistinguishable from either rage or joy, as she grabbed him by the throat and started throttling the life out of him. He could hear his windpipe cracking under the strain of the onslaught and, as his vision blurred and started to fade, he was overcome with an odd sense of calm as time seemed to slow down around him.

He didn't care.

She was presumably already dead to be here, and he didn't even really hate her, she was _nothing_ to him. _Okay, so maybe once I was more than a little scared of her, but that was long before I'd already sacrificed my life_. _What more can she do to me? Kill me so I can finally get out of this dreary wasteland and what's surely the universe's worst ever host?_

Abaddon froze in place, her appearance taking on a dull, desiccated appearance, like a sandcastle sat too long out in the baking heat of the afternoon sun.

_Hate is not the opposite of love. It just proves you still think about that person more than yourself_. The odd friendships he'd had with Dean and Castiel, and to a certain extent Sam, had proved the inverse of that too, as it warped over time. There were only so many times you could face death with someone before at least a grudging respect is earned on both sides, no matter your differences.

"But she," he said to Death, as he pointed at his erstwhile attacker. "She's like a great, red-haired shark. What I saw as key selling points, she saw as weakness. None of us were ever anything more than bugs to squash beneath her well-heeled boots

"She didn't respect you?" asked Death.

"None of them did," Crowley exploded. He dragged himself to his feet. "She and all those other firstborns. All too damaged from being Lucifer's cast offs and too busy taking it out on the universe to get over it. They never appreciated the long game. _Someone_ had to bring the souls in."

"Interesting," said Death

"Huh. For you maybe," said Crowley, trying to brush the ingrained dust and blood out of his suit. "That bloody hurt," he added with a pout, although his injuries already seemed curiously reduced from before. Nonetheless, he still kicked out at the Knight of Hell. His foot struck his target and sent the silent figure exploding into a cloud of dark, dust motes.

Crowley watched as what remained of the demoness dissipated in the air. "In the end I realized, she was nothing to me, any more than I was ever anything to her."

"Is that important to you then, how you're perceived by others?"

"Of course. It's _all_ about power," explained Crowley.

"You told the Winchester's it was about another couple of inches," said Death with an amused, raised eyebrow.

"Those bloody gospels. And people wondered why I murdered the prophets? I tell you, I bloody well deserve a literary award for _services to the art,_ if nothing else," Crowley muttered under his breath before readying his address to Death. "I thought _you_, of all people, would understand _metaphor_," he scoffed. "Plus, it's always a good strategy to have your adversaries underestimate you. In the bed as much as on the battlefield," he added with a grin at Death's apparent discomfort.

He rubbed his chin as he pondered a sudden thought. "Actually, given I'm a salesman of sorts, perhaps 'boardroom' would have made a better analogy." He hummed an affirmative in his own agreement. "Although that's certainly been the scene of both bed and battlefield on more than one occasion, sometimes even the same one."

"Yes, well," said Death distastefully, hurriedly changing the subject. "It sounds to me like your motivations are more about revenge."

Crowley gave a bored shrug. "Nobody's perfect. Rebrand it as 'righteous indignation' and it'll sound like I work for the _other side_." He sighed, giving a worried look over his shoulder. "Look, this is all very cathartic, but is there any way out of here before I get assaulted by another figment of my - _clearly deeply disturbed _\- unconscious?"

"Of course. I think, deep down, you already know your choice," said Death, matter-of-factly. He drank deeply and noisily from his soft drink through the straw, the noise echoing rudely in the otherwise silence of their surroundings. "So what's it to be?"

"That would be telling," smirked Crowley, pleased to finally get his own back. _Sometimes I'm petty, so sue me_. A moment of alarm crossed his face as he started to disintegrate, but he forced himself to relax into it. "Don't wait up," he winked.

Death waited, patiently, until each dark, but sparkling, speck and mote had dispersed and scattered from view as they spread out to find their way in the universe. He stared deep, deep, into space as he sensed the direction of Crowley's choice. He cocked his head to one side and his lips twitched.

"Hmm. Well, I wouldn't have guessed that," he muttered to himself. He made no outward sign of acknowledgment at the appearance of a new figure behind him. "Definitely far too long with those Winchesters," he said, louder this time for the benefit of the newcomer. His mouth twisted in the closest approximation he had to a beaming smile.

"There may just be some hope for them all, yet."

**THE END**

~#~

**_"For if the darkness and corruption leave, a vestige of the thoughts that once I had,  
better by far you should forget and smile, than that you should remember and be sad"_**  
**_– 'Remember', Christina Rossetti_**

(;,;)


End file.
